Past Programs
Fantasy - 2008
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Trash and Treasure: Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan on 'Knightriders'
07/08/2008
Today George Romero's 1981 film Knightriders—in which Ed Harris leads a band of medieval performers on motorbikes across small town America. It's the pick of US based Italian film scholar Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, co-curator of the Romero retrospective at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival and writer of a book on Romero.
Wanted
31/07/2008
Rusian director Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch, Daywatch) is one of the great action fantasy visionaries. This is his first Hollywood film, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and JG Jones, about a loser in a boring office job who's inducted into an ancient sect of elite assassins. James McAvoy plays the deadbeat, Angelina Jolie is his mentor, while Morgan Freeman and Terence Stamp are brooding and mysterious. But they're all upstaged by Bekmambetov's psychedelic colours, CGI hallucinations and head spinning action. A delight.
Forbidden Kingdom
24/07/2008
Every kung-fu fan's dream—to wake up in old-world China and have an immortal master (Jackie Chan) teach you some snappy moves and a warrior monk (Jet Li) join your gang. A pity the American adolescent (Michael Angarano) at the centre of the story is such a lump. Ralph Macchio he aint. Unsatisfying Pacific Rim fusion cooked up in a studio exec's office.
Iron Man
01/05/2008
At the end of the screening of Iron Man I attended this week, a twenty-ish young person sitting near me turned to her companion and said: 'It's interesting that they've cast so many older people in this film. Not just Robert Downey Jr. Look at Gwyneth Paltrow. She must be at least 35.' Then she thought for a bit, and added, 'Well I guess John Favreaux is old too.'
Jeesh, I thought. That puts my generation of moviegoers in our place.
In fact, it's a relief to have an actor of Robert Downey's experience playing a super-hero in the latest comic strip movie. His lived-in face is a welcome change from the bland 20-year-olds usually cast in these films, and he also has his own style. That off-beat humour, that 'whoops, here I go again, I'm about to blurt something people around me may not like' expression is endearing.
I wouldn't put Iron Man up there with Downey's sophisticated performance in the vastly underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. But he carries this super-hero film with ease, and Gywneth Paltrow, as his impeccably groomed and loyal assistant Pepper Potts, matches him beat for beat. She looks pretty good too, for an old lady of 35!
To backtrack. Iron Man is the latest superhero film to spin off from Marvel Comics. This time, Stan Lee of Marvel has taken the risk of producing the film himself, rather than assigning rights to big studios.
Downey Jr plays Tony Stark, a hard living playboy who has inherited a vast military weapons and armaments empire from his father. Stark likes the good life, and leaves the running of the corporation to an offsider, Obadiah Stane, played by an impressively bulked up, bald and bearded Jeff Bridges. Yet Tony Stark has inherited his father's inventive talents: he's an engineering whiz who enjoys making ever more deadly weapons which the company can market to the American military.
Then things go wrong. On a trip to Afghanistan for a field demonstration, Stark is taken hostage by a group of warlords, and told to build them a Jericho missile. In his cave, he manages instead to fashion himself a rocket-propelled Iron Man suit, blast his way out, and escape. Now he's a changed man: the reality of what his weapons do to people hits him for the very first time. Henceforth, Iron Man will be on the side of the oppressed.
It's an interesting story line this, one which embeds within it some implied criticisms of warmongering with high tech armaments in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Director John Favreaux and his cast have pulled off a highly entertaining, well paced, nicely characterised action movie.
But I am in two minds about this film or, at least, about the way it is being celebrated by some critics as a film which successfully critiques American military adventurism within a popular genre.
The fact is, Iron Man uses very high tech weapons to fight other very high tech weapons. The fact that he wears these as a kind of personal armour (Ned Kelly anyone?) doesn't actually alter this equation. It's still big toys for the boys.
You could, I think, just as easily read this film as a sad compensatory fantasy of technological invincibility, pitched at Americans sending more and more troops to die in unwinnable wars. Iron Man is an invincible good guy, on the side of the oppressed, get it?
It's those nasty arms dealers who are the problem. They keep putting weapons into the wrong hands.
Whether superior technical firepower can succeed against guerrilla forces on their own territory, as in Afghanistan where the film is set, is a question simply ignored. A superhero who helps villagers put in wells, educate their children, and grow non-opium crops anyone? I don't think so.
Ah well, it's only a movie. And a very entertaining one, at that. Just don't think too hard about deeper meanings.
Nim's Island
10/04/2008
This is a children's adventure story starring Abigal Breslin as a very confident young girl who lives on a South Pacific island with her scientist dad, and a lizard, a pelican and a sea lion for company.
They're not Robinson Crusoeing it -- they have internet and email. But when Dad goes off sailing for a few days to try to capture a rare bit of microscopic marine life, he's caught in a tropical monsoon, his yacht is demasted, and he's in trouble. Back on the island, Nim manages to get an email out to a swashbucking writer of adventure yarns, Alex Rover, who has been emailing her dad with questions about volcanoes.
But Alex is actually Alexandra (Jodie Foster) and she's a completely neurotic, agoraphobic writer too scared to step out her front door. Somehow she has to get to Nim. It's an interesting thing about Jodie Foster: so many of the projects this highly intelligent, former child star has taken on as an actor or producer are about overcoming fears.
Just think: The Silence of the Lambs, The Panic Room. This film has the same message. It's a good message for kids, I just wish the film had been directed without being so heavy handed.
Still, it's more interesting entertainment than most of the computer generated, monster-infested fare out there right now for children.
The Mist
07/02/2008
This is a 'lifeboat movie' -- the kind where a group of characters are flung together by chance to face a great peril. Here there's a group of shoppers trapped in a small-town supermarket with a pea-soup mist and bloodthirsty monsters lurking outside. Based on a 1980 Stephen King novella, it plays as a good metaphor for contemporary America. As the characters freak out they divide into two groups -- religious doomsayers and humanists -- and they end up fighting each other as much as the monsters.
An acid-tongued, born-again Christian (Marcia Gay Harden) whips her lot into a frenzy, claiming the day of judgment has come, while on the other side Thomas Jane leads a group who believe they can nut out the problem and find a way to escape. This is director Frank Darabont's third Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and I liked it a lot. Except for the beasties. What I imagined lurked in the mist was much more terrifying than what the CGI wizards came up with.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
24/01/2008
I am not always a fan of Tim Burton's Gothic capers. All those jangling skeletons in navy blue, for example...please could he find a new screen palette?
But Sweeney Todd is something else. Burton's film has converted me, and may well convert many other people who don't go to stage musicals, to the genius of Stephen Sondheim, a creator of contemporary operas which actually have something real, and occasionally dark, to say.
This is an opera of revenge, as many great operas are. It's also bloody. Blood oozes in this film, pools on the pavement, trickles down walls and garments, stains and seeps and splatters. What with this film, the Coen Brothers and the upcoming There Will Be Blood this is probably the ooziest season at the movies since Kubrick released The Shining.
But the blood in this film is heightened, stagy, hyper-real. We know it's theatre blood. This is what makes Burton such a terrific director of a sly and chilling opera. He has let the power of Sondheim's words and music rip. He has brought together actors who can sing, rather than asking singers to act -- which is what Sondheim preferred.
Johnny Depp is compelling as the bitter barber. Is there anything this man can't do? Helena Bonham Carter makes a lusty, opportunistic accomplice, Mrs Lovett. Alan Rickman as the hypocritical Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall as the greedy Beadle and Sacha Baron Cohen, bless him, as the rival barber all hold us in thrall. Interesting really - it's Burton's Sweeney Todd who shows us the gusto I've been missing from most Dickens adaptations onscreen. This is florid emotions and dry as bone lyrics, distancing the upsweep. I loved it.
I Am Legend
03/01/2008
I love a good post-apocalypse story, novel or film. I've enjoyed them for years. The first Angela Carter novel I ever read was a post-apocalypse tale called Heroes and Villains. Jolly good it was too.
The latest was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which the great American tragedian takes a familiar scenario -- a man, a child, a blackened landscape; the will and ingenuity needed to survive -- and makes it art through total immersion in an imagined world, conjured in precise poetic prose.
Then there are the great post-apocalyptic moments. In which Phillip K Dick novel, for example, did someone say: 'If you stand downwind, you can smell America burning'?
I Am Legend is based on a l954 novel by Richard Matheson, who also invented The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was first adapted as a film The Omega Man, in l971. This time round the screenplay is by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman.
We begin with a hunt. A man and his dog are stalking a deer through the deserted, overgrown streets and highrise buildings of Manhattan. Other game prowl and scatter. Packs of wild dogs, other deer, a tiger. It's a thrilling conceit, beautifully realised. The empty concrete canyons, the crumbling sidewalks, vines twining through abandoned cars. Tufts of weed, waist high, sprouting through cracked footpaths.
Danny Boyle did it better earlier, using the empty streets of London as a set for his zombie film 28 Days Later.
But it's still impressive; more so because of the detail. This is not a set; these are streets we know, if only from cinema.
Our hunter is a man alone in Manhattan. Yes there are vicious feral dogs, and a pride of rampaging lions. There are store dummies. But our man, a very organised military scientist, has no-one to talk to except photographs of his wife and kids and a beautiful Alsatian dog, Sam, who rides with Neville in his sports car, hunts with him -- walks side by side with him on his own treadmill when it's time to exercise.
Flashbacks explain some things. Neville is the only human survivor of a deadly genetically engineered virus originally developed as a vaccine against cancer. It mutated, turning human beings into raging, daylight-phobic zombies. It seems to have the same effect on dogs, though mysteriously deer, tigers and other wildlife are unaffected.
Neville scavenges systematically by day and, in a laboratory, tries to find an anti-viral cure. He exercises, hunts, watches old movies and breakfast newscasts on DVD. At night he barricades his Manhattan apartment against those who prowl the dark.
And he talks to his dog. As another dog-talker, I thought this was rather neat. It beats the hell out of Tom Hanks talking to his basketball in Castaway.
But as a hardened dog-owning moviegoer, my heart was sinking. Hardened because while the night prowling mutants or zombies do provide some heart-stopping moments, we are not asked to care one zot when they are stopped in their tracks. They are just greyish, animated zombie matter.
But the dog is different. At a certain stage we just know, by the rules of dramatic logic, that Sam is at risk.
Can we stand it? Who will Robert Neville talk to now?
Well...can't tell you that. But I can say that finally Neville is not alone. And after a gripping first hour, the film goes downhill in the last great battle against the greyish, computer-generated and basically pretty uninteresting zombies.
Making the film an argument between science and religion doesn't help much either.
It was during the zombie rampage that I began to ponder the following questions: Who is maintaining the power supplying Robert Neville's DVD player, treadmill, apartment and laboratory? Isn't the first law of post-apocalypse stories that after a certain time the lights go out?
Why, if Neville is the sole survivor, is he trying to invent a vaccine or an anti-venine (the film isn't exactly clear which it is)?
And is there or is there not a land beyond? You know, there is a happy land where the elect, that is the survivors, have been able to re-establish normality. The land beyond is a key idea in post-apocalypse stories, whether The Children of Men, or The Road. It's a constant subject of rumour, speculation, fantasy and desire for the struggling survivors. It's a Christian hymn: 'There is a happy land far away'. It's a gated community. It's an ideal. It's a boundary all must pass.
The land beyond pops up again, unexplored and unexplained, in I Am Legend. It's so neat I was furious. But by then I had given up on the movie.
I Am Legend is initially interesting entertainment. The first hour zips along but the finale makes it just another movie with snarling grey CGI zombies, and a simplistic lecture about religion good; science bad. Spare us.
It's screening nationally and is rated M. Dog lovers beware.
